Thursday, 21 May 2015

"Dramatic comedy, from which fictional comedy is mainly descended, has
been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles and character
types."
(Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism)

"The days of Comedy are gone, alas!

When Congreve's fool could vie with Moliere's bete:

Society is smooth'd to that excess,

That manners hardly differ more than dress."

--- Byron

"Man is the merriest species of the creation, all above and below him are serious."
--- Addison

“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to
those that feel.”

--- Horace Walpole.

“Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.”

--- Peter Ustinov

“The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.”

--- Moliere.

"In the hands of a comic genius the pretence of stupidity is the triumph of irony."

"In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter."
--- Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield. 9 March 1748.

"For your race, in
its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power,
Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal
humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by
century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against
the assault of Laughter nothing can stand."

--- Satan, in Mark Twain's "The Chronicle of Young Satan"

“As the purpose of
comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be
exempt.”

--- Moliere.

“The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool,
and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.”

--- Miguel de Cervantes.

"The principle of the humor is the principle that unincremental
repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny. In a
tragedy - Oedipus Tyrannus is the stock example - repetition
leads logically to catastrophe. Repetition overdone or not going
anywhere belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like
other reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern." (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism)

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
--- Albert Einstein

“One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.”

--- V. S. Naipaul.

“In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is
a moment.”

--- Christopher Fry.

“Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a
smile.”

--- J. B. Priestley.

“Humor is properly the exponent of low things; that which
first renders them poetical to the mind. The man of Humor sees common life,
even mean life, under the new light of sportfulness and love; whatever has
existence has a charm for him. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest
perfection of poetic genius. He who wants it, be his other gifts what they may,
has only half a mind; an eye for what is above him, not for what is about him
or below him.”

“It is not funny that anything else should fall down, only
that a man should fall down ... Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely
religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man
can be dignified.”

--- G. K. Chesterton, "Spiritualism", in All Things Considered (1908)

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense
for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true
authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as
by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”

--- Søren Kierkegaard, in Stages on Life's Way (1845)

"Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the
faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the
powers of the soul; and thus far it may be looked upon as a weakness in
the composition of human nature."
--- Addison

Parody is critical intelligence in humorous mode.

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written
consisting entirely of jokes.”

--- Ludwig Wittgenstein, as quoted in "A View from the
Asylum"

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

“Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a
narrow escape into faith.”

--- Christopher Fry

“The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other
men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and
gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue
alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his
fellow-men can do little for him.”

--- Ralph Waldo Emerso

“Comedy naturally wears itself out -- destroys the very food
on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and
weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth
laughing at.”

--- William Hazlitt

"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source
of humour is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in Heaven."--- Mark Twain

‘Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind,
weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all
the powers of the soul; and thus far it may be looked upon as a weakness in the
composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent reliefs we receive
from it, and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and
damp our spirits, with transient unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care
not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.’

--- Addison

“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really
funny book.”

--- Ernest Hemingway.

"The onset is sudden, with attacks of laughing and crying
lasting for a few minutes to a few hours, followed by a respite and then a
recurrence. The attack is accompanied by restlessness and on occasions violence
when restraint is attempted. The patient may say that things are moving around
in the head and that she fears that someone is running after her. The
examination is notable for the absence of abnormal physical signs. No fever was
detected, although some reported that they had had fever after a few days. The
only abnormalities found were in the central nervous system. The pupils were
frequently more dilated than controls, but always reacted to light. The tendon
reflexes in the lower limbs were frequently exaggerated. There were no tremors
or fits or losses of consciousness. The neck was not stiff."

“A pleasant comedy, which paints the manners of the age, and
exposes a faithful picture of nature, is a durable work, and is transmitted to
the latest posterity. But a system, whether physical or metaphysical, commonly
owes its success to its novelty; and is no sooner canvassed with impartiality
than its weakness is discovered.”

--- David Hume

“The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may
analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are
outgrowing, or trying to reshape.”

---Thornton
Wilder.

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

--- William Shakespeare, A
Midsummer Night's Dream.

“The comic and the tragic lie close together, inseparable,
like light and shadow.”

--- Socrates.

“Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor;
for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will
not bear serious examination is false wit.”

---Aristotle (384 BC
- 322 BC)

"If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and naturally disposed to it. "
--- Joseph Addison

"Laughter relieves us of superfluous energy, which, if it remained unused, might become negative, that is, poison. Laughter is the antidote. "
--- George Gurdjieff

Thursday, 30 October 2014

A Handbook to the
Reception of Ovid. Edited by John F. Miller and Carole. E. Newlands.
Wiley-Blackwell. 2014. 520pp. £120 (Cloth). £96.99 (ebook)

‘Antiquity is a closed
system, providing a canon of texts whose perfection is beyond time: criticism
of these texts is an eternal return, the rediscovery of the timeless verities
that they contain.’ [....] ‘No one,
of course, has ever really believed this nonsense.’ (Fowler, 1994: 231)

This new collection of thirty-one essays explores how Ovid’s works have presented a range of ways of thinking and
feeling about desire, love and death; power and aggression; exile and
alienation; self-reflexivity and transformation; aesthetic traditions and the
artist’s journey. Clearly, the universality of Ovid’s major themes and
preoccupations helps to explain his major influence on the arts of the two millennia
since his death. As a result, it is not difficult to understand why he has had
a such a significant influence on the Western cultural tradition – from literature
to opera, and from art to film. The sheer variety and adaptability of Ovid’s
writingshelped him to become one of the
major figures in classical literature. The wonderful transmission of his work
suggests that he should be central to what E.D Hirsch has called our ‘cultural literacy.’ This volume
shows the canonical range of that literacy, through Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope (and many others) to passing popular cultural
references that persist in ‘iconic’ films ranging from Raymond Chandler and Howard
Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946)
to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut
(1999). The Handbook will send the
general reader back to Ovid with eyes wide open, and more alert to the
intricacy of the poetry, and to the wonder of the subject matter. While the
delightful burden of the past predominates, there are many culturally literate
references on the glittering surface of the contemporary fields of gold.

Cultural literacy, far from being tradition for its own
sake, shows that Ovid still speaks directly to present interests. In the past we
have had romantic Ovids, classical Ovids, moral Ovids, rude and rebellious
Ovids; arguably, he is what any reader will make of him in the act of
reception, and in the context of a relative distance from the variety of
original Ovids, still sparkling at the ‘source.’ The reception of Ovid springs
from the relativity of reader’s approaches, and also from the layers of
reception that filter and obscure, or enlighten and surprise. They playful
ambiguity of Ovid’s poetic textures and phases of development entail multiple
readings of the source texts and within the transformative playfulness of
transformation. Given the situation outlined in these opening remarks, one the
benefits of multiple-author approaches in a critical handbook of this type is
that a wide range of receptions can be accommodated rather than an ideological
limitation of vision, or an analytical narrowness of critical frame.

As a result of the variety of themes that emerge from the
poetry it makes sense to construct different Ovids that can be shaped and
adapted in different ways according to the spirit of the age. The reception of
the poetry may spring from a discovery of the plenitude of the subject matter,
such as the weaving of myths in the Metamorphoses
and the varied approaches to love. Others have found inspiration in the
imitation of his style and approach to topics; again, the key word is variety.
Where one reader finds a pre-figuring of Troubadour, and later romantic or
modern sensibilities, another finds gritty and cynical psychological realism.
Ovid’s style draws the reader closer to the emotional drama but also pulls back
with playful and ironic detachment. This
is the logic of seduction and also of exile, recurring themes in Ovid’s work
and perhaps inextricably woven into his life story.

In fact, Ovid typically exceeds any of the systems and categorisations
that seek to hold him in place for more than a passing moment. He is the most
slippery and transformative of poetic creatures. He did not fit in with the
official ideology of Augustan society; but the moment we want to run with the
rebels we need to be quickly reminded that he poignantly sought and begged to
return from the tortures of an enforced exile. Thus it becomes possible to
think of Ovid as the exponent of Augustan values and also their most profound
critic. These fault lines in the life and times of the poet find many echoes in
the after-tremors of his reception. This means that within successive periods
it is possible to propose information generalizations then also require various
forms of qualification in order to accommodate the underlying variety of Ovid’s
poetry. This does not mean that there is not, in a sense, a distinctive voice
or mode, that we can call Ovidian. Indeed, he sounds different, and self-consciously
wants to be set apart from his predecessors and contemporaries; moreover, this
reflection seems to hold no matter how much he draws imitatively and
parasitically on their achievements. The Ovidian corpus/opus is as profoundly
natural as it is enigmatically artificial.

The Handbook is at
its thinnest on the early nineteenth century; the strengths are in the
renaissance, restoration and ‘Augustan’ period when the gravitational pull of the
Ovidian universe was at its strongest. One of the strengths of these chapters
(14 top 25) is that they individual offer the delightful sense of creative
cross-fertilizations, critical transformations, and dialogical histories. The
open spirit of reception also means that the linear narrative of medieval
allegory/ morality, for instance, can be challenged and disrupted, in favour of
more nuanced and more inspired readings. The tension between contemporary
domestication, proto-feminist liberation, moral censure and aesthetic delight
are no where more evident than in various receptions experienced by Ovid
throughout the early modern period and the long eighteenth-century.

The fatal triangle of fetishism, voyeurism, and misogyny
that presents a challenge to modern readers of ‘enlightened’ writers will
inevitably discover those same issues coming up in their reading of the
critical literature on Ovid. Classical studies have come a long way since the
‘pioneering’ work of Pomeroy on gender and Foucault on ‘epistemic’ shifts. (See
Brooke Holmes, 2012); similarly, the ideological formulations of Ellen Pollak
and Laura Brown (on Swift and Pope), perhaps require as much rethinking as the misogynistic
simplifications that they were attacking.

The critical problems are present at the source as much as
they are in precluded (or prioritised) in the transitions. This collection of
essays steers clear of large helpings of theory — whether of the feminist, or post-structuralist
approach. That is a potential weakness for the Handbook, in my view, given the attempt to accommodate the solid
ground of the early-moderns alongside the shifting sands of the postmodern. I
would have liked a chapter on rape and aggression, for instance, considered as
both a theme and a narrative, that accommodates both the scholarship and the
theories that condemn and that defend Ovid’s approach to such an important
issue. My readings of classical scholarship have taught me that the
investigation of gender and sexuality by classicists has been both evaded and
foregrounded in the last thirty years. The chapter on cinema, at the end of the
book, for instance, might have alerted us to the significance of the ‘male
gaze’, whether it’s the primary narcissism of culture or the power politics from
Lacan to Laura Mulvey. I would also have liked a philosophical chapter on
reception that offered a survey of critical issues cropping up in the
theoretical field of translation studies; perhaps specifically related to the
Ovidian transmission of cultural values. (See Venuti, 2012).

Undoubtedly many readers will, like me, find themselves
devouring this volume on the first reading and then coming back for more — perhaps
as they did in their younger days, on first discovering the delights of the Metamorphoses. Despite some of my
theoretical hankerings this Handbook to the Reception of Ovid is an erudite and
magisterial collection of essays that will delight those who already belong to
the School of Ovid,
and will be a generous introduction and trusted guide for those encountering
the great poet’s work for the first time. While readers will also want to
consult works by Doody (1985), Hopkins (2010), Oakley-Brown (2006) and
Martindale (1988) — among many others, too numerous to list — this new Handbook is highly recommended as a
scholarly introduction to the reception of Ovid.

John F. Miller
is the Arthur F. and Marian W. Stocker Professor of Classics and Chair
of the Department of Classics at the University of Virginia. His
publications include Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets (2009) and Ovid’s Elegiac Festivals: Studies in the Fasti (1991).

Carole Newlands is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her publications include Statius: Poet between Rome and Naples (2012); Statius, Siluae 2, A Commentary (2011); Statius’ Siluae and the Poetics of Empire (2002); Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (1995).

A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid
presents more than 30 original essays written by leading scholars
revealing the rich diversity of critical engagement with Ovid’s poetry
that spans the Western tradition from antiquity to the present day.

Offers innovative perspectives on Ovid’s poetry and its reception from antiquity to the present day

Features contributions from more than 30 leading scholars in the Humanities.

Introduces familiar and unfamiliar figures in the history of Ovidian reception.

Demonstrates the enduring and transformative power of Ovid’s poetry into modern times.

Friday, 8 August 2014

Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the
very gold of truth.

D. H. Lawrence

'the story depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes
and leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by 'accident'
in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is, in fact,
essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.' A.C. Bradley,
Shakespearean Tragedy

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer
balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious,
although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the
tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will,
in the perfectibility of man.
Arthur Miller, Tragedy and the Common Man

Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a
void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and
global. The events of 11 September
2001 are not exception.

Tariq Ali, The Clash
of Fundamentalisms

Farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer
tragedy in its essence than comedy is.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 20 August 1833.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less
about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Václav Havel, Letters
to Olga (1988)

'The suffering and calamity are, moreover,
exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person. They are themselves of some
striking kind. They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with
previous happiness or glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death
by disease, poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however
piteous or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean
sense.' A.C. Bradley,
Shakespearean Tragedy

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in
such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

Oscar Wilde

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved
by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and
destruction in the drift of the world.

George Steiner

A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you
finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and
sees blonde hairs on his collar?

Alan Ayckbourn, A Crash Course in Playwriting (1993)

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be
remembered is how much has been escaped.

Samuel Johnson

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for
Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Thomas Carlyle

Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then,
affecting the hero, and—we must now add—generally extending far and wide beyond
him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient
in tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity.
But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity,
will naturally vary greatly.

A.C. Bradley,
Shakespearean Tragedy

A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because
the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.

Horace Walpole, Letter
To Robert Jephson

The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.

Aristotle

The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they
proceed mainly from actions, and those the actions of men.We see a number of human beings placed in certain
circumstances; and we see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in
these circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these
others beget others again, until this series of inter-connected deeds leads by
an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. A.C. Bradley,
Shakespearean Tragedy

Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it
often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against
another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any
resolution.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking
the Spell (2006)

In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting
what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.

Oscar Wilde

A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who 'stood in high
degree,' happy and apparently secure,—such was the tragic fact to the mediaeval
mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and pity; it startled also
another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men and awed them. It made them
feel that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable power,
called by the name of Fortune or some other name,—a power which appears to
smile on him for a little, and then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.
A.C. Bradley,
Shakespearean Tragedy

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not
triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which
destroy him.

George Orwell

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his
concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to
say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

Arthur Miller

The real tragedy of England
as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made
England is so
vile.

D.H. Lawrence, Nottingham and
the Mining Countryside, 1936.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.

Aldous Huxley

The tragedy of love is indifference.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Trembling of a Leaf

The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be
said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character
issuing in action.
A.C. Bradley,
Shakespearean Tragedy

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which
exists in pain.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what
tragedy means.

Tom Stoppard

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your
heart's desire. The other is to get it.

George Bernard Shaw

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in
long-shot.

Charlie Chaplin

If we are to include the outer and the inner
struggle in a conception more definite than that of conflict in general, we
must employ some such phrase as 'spiritual force.' This will mean whatever
forces act in the human spirit, whether good or evil, whether personal passion
or impersonal principle; doubts, desires, scruples, ideas—whatever can animate,
shake, possess, and drive a man's soul. [19]In a Shakespearean tragedy some such forces are shown
in conflict.
A.C. Bradley,
Shakespearean Tragedy

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and
identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are
ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them
one, therein too lies the danger.

George Santayana

It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no
more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with
all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout -- not moan,
or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to
say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.

Jean Anouilh

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his
concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to
say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

Arthur Miller, Collected
Plays (1958)

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it
tragically.

D. H. Lawrence

Tragedy springs from outrage; it protests at the conditions
of life. It carries in it the possibilities of disorder, for all tragic poets
have something of the rebelliousness of Antigone. Goethe, on the contrary,
loathed disorder. He once said that he preferred injustice, signifying by that
cruel assertion not his support for reactionary political ideals, but his
conviction that injustice is temporary and reparable whereas disorder destroys
the very possibilities of human progress. Again, this is an anti-tragic view;
in tragedy it is the individual instance of injustice that informs the general
pretence of order. One Hamlet is enough to convict a state of rottenness.

George Steiner

The great tragedy of Science the slaying of a beautiful
hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas Henry Huxley, Presidential Address at the British Association (1870)

Kozintsev - Shakespeare - Hamlet

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

Angela Carter, Wise
Children (1991)

Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and
smelling self-consciously. Wyndham Lewis, Inferior
Religions (1917)

It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright
thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in
our time-the heart and spirit of the average man.
Arthur Miller, Tragedy and the Common Man

Laughter is wine for the soul – laughter soft, or loud and
deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life
together, arm in arm, all along, out along, down along lea. A laugh is a great
natural stimulator, a pushful entry into life; and once we can laugh, we can
live. It is the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.

Seán O'casey, The
Green Crow (1956)

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing
less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Edith Hamilton

Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of
suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It
is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.

George Orwell, Burmese
Days (1934)

Tragedy obviously does not lie in a conflict of Right and
Wrong, but in a collision between two different kinds of Right

Peter Shaffer, Equus
(1973)

Here is tragedy and here is America.
For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact
that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be
said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public
sense, is a respectable vacuum.

H. L. Mencken, More
Tips for Novelists, Chicago
Tribune (2 May 1926)

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to
present us his?

Emil Cioran

Marston is a writer of great merit, who rose to tragedy from
the ground of comedy, and whose forte was not sympathy, either with the
stronger or softer emotions, but an impatient scorn and bitter indignation
against the vices and follies of men, which vented itself either in comic irony
or in lofty invective. He was properly a satirist.

William Hazlitt, Lectures
on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth(1820)

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to
those that feel.

Horace Walpole

And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying
themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no
other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery, because that greatness
of soul which it exhibits oppressed, conflicting and destroyed, is the highest
existence in our view. It forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realise
so vividly the worth of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek
comfort in the reflection that all is vanity.
A.C. Bradley,
Shakespearean Tragedy

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and
culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our
condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it —
the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

Saul Bellow, Great
Jewish Short Stories

Greek tragedy met her death in a different way from all the
older sister arts: she died tragically by her own hand, after irresolvable
conflicts, while the others died happy and peaceful at an advanced age. If a
painless death, leaving behind beautiful progeny, is the sign of a happy
natural state, then the endings of the other arts show us the example of just such
a happy natural state: they sink slowly, and with their dying eyes they behold
their fairer offspring, who lift up their heads in bold impatience. The death
of Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left a great void whose effects were felt
profoundly, far and wide; as once Greek sailors in Tiberius' time heard the
distressing cry 'the god Pan is dead' issuing from a lonely island, now,
throughout the Hellenic world, this cry resounded like an agonized lament:
'Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny,
stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old
masters' crumbs!'

Wednesday, 16 April 2014

The publication of a new edition of Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy
(1904) presents a timely opportunity to explore a classic expression of
the theory and practice of tragic drama. This is also an opportunity for
new readers to encounter a distinctive appreciation of Shakespeare’s
work in the context of more recent literary and cultural theories. In
the process, the obstacles to a clear understanding of what Bradley
thought are explored, and we seek to explain why many critics were often
hostile to his writings on Shakespeare. We then proceed to an
interrogation of Bradley’s philosophy of tragedy in the context the
wider project of the development of English Studies as an educational
discipline since the end of the nineteenth century. This frame of
analysis will also be informed by recent post-colonial theories which
will be positioned within the context of literary study understood as a
distinctive project of enlightened humane education. [...] One of the
predicaments for Bradley, writing at the beginning of the twentieth
century is how to accommodate a true representation of Shakespearean
tragedy that responds to the ideology of the nineteenth century. He is
writing in the context of the British imperial project and mass
industrialisation, but ten years before the cataclysmic events of the
First World War (1914-18). In this regard, the virtual absence of any
historical particularities is a noteworthy silence in the text. One
criticism might be that the romantic timelessness of Shakespeare seeks
to naturalize a world order that is already showing signs of political
if not ideological crisis.

Friday, 29 November 2013

Nowadays, so much academic writing is simply a rehash of other people's work. Textbooks, in particular, are prone to the vice of uncritical recycling.Clearly, however, there is a virtue in building on the work of others. Work in the humanities has become very specialised (since the 1970s) and this means that we are standing on the shoulders of an army of scholars, not to mention the proverbial giants and geniuses of the past.Nonetheless, excessive use of citation suggests perhaps a lack of confidence in your own thought and creativity. A literature review may be the starting point of a research project, but it is not the final destination.I was led to these rather banal reflections having recently picked up a copy of John Russell Brown's engaging and thoughtful book: Shakespeare: The Tragedies (2001). This book has four citations, two of which refer to the work of Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830. (1983)Now that's perhaps the limit to downsize your references: citation lite !Dr Ian McCormick is the author of The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences (2013) ... also available on Kindle, or to download. A bargain!

Wednesday, 22 May 2013

In the exam you are typically provided with a short extract from one of Shakespeare plays. This blog provides a checklist of the key points that you will need to write about. This exercise is an opportunity to show off your understanding and your critical vocabulary, and to demonstrate your awareness of how literary and rhetorical techniques contribute to effective dramatic writing.

Finding your bearings

Keywords: conflict,
drama, character, theme

Who are the main protagonists, and who are the subsidiary
speakers? Which characters prompt or lead the discussion? Who dominates?

Think about

the context for the action,

the sense of conflict or rapport and dramatic situation

how the extract helps to develop a character/psychology/motivation/emotion

... or to advance a theme.

Think about what has happened before, and what will happen after
the selected scene/extract

Is there an emotional highpoint or specific dramatic moments
that have more emphasis than others? Identify precisely where these happen in
the extract, and think about how they are achieved.

Are the speakers balanced in equal exchanges? Are they
engaged in verbal combat, or witty wordplay (puns/innuendo/logical games)

Is there a power difference between speakers
(age/class/gender/situation)

Check for dramatic irony in relation to characters and the
audience.

Speaking Voices

Shakespeare’s plays are not a transcript of conversational
speech, but they may employ colloquial elements and slang, sexual jokes,
rudeness and less formal, less poetic speech rhythms. Sometimes he employs prose,
or irregular verse. You should comment on these aspects of the extract.

Shakespeare tends to employ unrhymed verse, but sometime the
final two lines of a scene are a rhyming couplet. This provides a more emphatic
closure.

Pace

How does Shakespeare vary the pace? Look for shifts in
rhythm and timing, and don’t just pause at the end of very line. Shakespeare’s
verse is very flexible, and presents many cues for actors, as well as
opportunities for variations in volume, pitch and pace.

Because renaissance writers were trained in the classical rhetoric
you will find many of the literary devices and rhetorical techniques which are
frequent in formal public speeches.

This artificial formality (prepared speech) many contribute
to a sense of linguistic performance and dexterity (verbal skills). Polished
and eloquent speech was the sign of an educated gentleman or a courtier.

The deployment of rhetoric provides a sense of wit,
intelligence and refinement, but it was also used to present deeper thoughts
and feelings of the character.

Language and style should be related to issues of power, but
remember that Shakespeare can be quite effective and dramatic in the way that
he satirises and mocks the powerful, and the way that he gives a voice to women,
the poor, and the outsider.

Shakespeare’s audience delighted in the playfulness,
mobility and resourcefulness of language.

Rather than just identifying and naming a rhetorical or
literary technique explain how it functions to produce emphasis, more vivid
pictures or imagery, or amplifies, deepens and develops an idea. Explains its
impact and effectiveness.